Open The Dialogue

I attended a Corporate Communication International (CCI) Symposium on reputation last Friday at Pfizer.  The title of the event was “Trust Me? Rebuilding Business Credibility” but the picture painted by the speakers was quite bleak.  “Trust has evaporated” said James E. Murphy, Chairman & CEO of Murphy & Co. and PR Coalition, Chair, and has been exasperated by the sinking economy due to fraud and lack of transparency.  Matthew J. Harrington, U.S. CEO & President of Edelman, presented data that showed that the decline in trust in US corporations mirrored the decline of the US stock market.  The trend was across all economic sectors and all media outlets, including social media channels.  The only organizations to suffer the least were non-governmental organizations (NGO).

The figure below, pulled from the Edelman Trust Barometer of 2009, shows a decline in trust in various social media channels.  The relevant ones are highlighted below and chart a dramatic decline in trust over the previous year.

Trust in Corporations Through Different Channels

This should not be surprising especially when companies like Belkin are accused of trying to game the system for the company’s benefit.  Some of the key suggestions in weathering this depression in trust and reputation include:

• Adhering to strict ethics both internally and externally.
• Transparency – being open and honest in dealings.
• Engaging with both government and NGO’s.
• Mutual social responsibility – integrating social causes that both benefit the communities and the corporation.
• Shared sacrifices – making sure that all levels in the corporation share in the profits and losses.
• Continuous conversation – engaging in dialogue with all stakeholders through all channels including social media. (Johnson & Johnson and Cisco websites were cited as examples.)

Despite these sobering numbers, the emphasis on social media as an effective tool to rehabilitate the trust between an organization and its publics was significant.  For more insight on the subject, I would definitely recommend Matt Rose’s blog on corporate reputation here.

You don’t need to reach everyone all the time.

The beauty of fragmented media consumption means that omnipresence is important from the perspective of accessibility, not necessarily dominance, of a certain medium.

A while ago, Robert Scoble mentioned he was doing a comparison of FriendFeed vs. Facebook.  I’m assuming he meant their feature sets, user bases, etc. but maybe not specific roles for the communities they cater to.  Essentially, a “which one is better” discussion.  Concerned that he was comparing apples & oranges, I (along w/ Brian Wallace) left a comment on his status about why there is a place for both in this world and why each have their obvious benefits:

Facebook vs. FriendFeed

I point out some intrinsic differences in terms of how each tool relies on its user to generate content, populate it and keep it alive.  The basic argument being that Facebook is a “social utility” in the sense that it is shaped around us generating data about how we move throughout our lives.  I became friends with someone?  That is a data point in addition to how an imported note would be.  FriendFeed doesn’t have the deep social interactions built-in just yet (or maybe never?).  It’s focused on the content we put into it and want to aggregate/broadcast to others.  Facebook has similar features but the audiences and user bases are clearly worlds apart.

One won’t overtake the other and each have a place on the web because there is a very specific audience FriendFeed resonates with and that differs, as a broad assumption, to the audience on Facebook.  My activity on FriendFeed is squarely focused on content ephemera while 95% of the people I’m friends on with Facebook are real relationships I have outside of the web.  As marketers, we should be very cognizant of that.  People can be using these two tools in very distinctly different ways:  they’re not interchangable. 

People consume things differently. Not the same way as the next and certainly not at the same rate as the next. It is key to realize that your audience is now distributed across the social web and there is still tremendous value in someone who might follow you on Twitter but not really care for your blog all that much. Don’t be bummed about the lack of all-encompassing inclusion, it just means the quality of the connection is higher. How someone follows or engages with you usually means that they find that method to be of highest value to them. You want that. You want to be ultimately accessible to the point where every aspect of information changing hands helps your audience.

To close, good insight from Micah Baldwin of Lijit:

“we as online content generators forget our daily voice and wear the voices getting traction. dont be @garyvee; I just want to hear you.”

Photo credit, lynetter.

We’ve been pretty radio silent here at OTD as 2008 wound down and we launched head-first into 2009.  We’re back at it today with a very exciting announcement.

100 Words for 100 Days

With President-Elect Barack Obama officially taking office just days away, MWW Group is launching a national initiative today asking YOU about what change America is ready for in the first 100 days of his presidency.  We’re searching for both individuals and organizations to tell us about their idea of positive change that can be effected within the first 100 days of the Obama administration.

The winning organization will earn three full months of PR support from MWW Group (worth $30,000) to help implement that change. The winning individual will earn a $5,000 paid internship at any of MWW Group’s ten offices to learn PR skills that will help them affect change.

How do you win?

Both written and video entries can be submitted here:  mww.com/change.   The winning organization and individual will be chosen within 30 days of Obama’s inauguration.  The PR support and internship will begin thereafter.

Why is MWW Group doing this?

Every President since FDR has been measured by his accomplishments during the first 100 days in office.  The purpose of this initiative is to make sure Barack Obama isn’t the only one focusing on moving forward during that time frame.  We want to do our part and challenge America to think about how we all can make a difference.  In return, we’re offering our services to help you further the wave of positive change our country so desperately needs.

Please help spread the word.  We’re looking forward to watching, listening and reading all of your submissions.

mww.com/change

Official press release

Questions?  Leave a comment or e-mail us.

Recently, Jamin Brophy-Warren of the WSJ took a deep look at the simmering trend of people sharing the minutae of their daily lives online.  This goes far past pictures of their kids or love songs written about cats and more towards the average mean of pepperoni slices consumed throughout the calendar year.

Everyone creates data — every smile, conversation and car ride is a potential datapoint. These quotidan aggregators believe that the compilation of our daily activities can reveal the secret patterns that govern the way we live. For students of personal informatics, the practice is liberating because it shows that our lives aren’t random, and are more orderly than some might expect.

Along with a host of data-centric social applications (DOPPLR, Last.fm, Brightkite/Fire Eagle), the Nick Felton-created Daytum and M.I.T.-incubated Mycrocosm are both sites that help aggregate this personal data.  The more social applications, like DOPPLR, aim to connect people in ways that weren’t possible previously while Daytum and Mycrocosm are focused on “collecton of the self.”

In an age where we have CEOs on Twitter, telling a great story means making it as believable as possible for your audience.  What better proof points than straight, sometimes raw, data?  Showing that you actually did someting or are in the process of doing something as opposed to just talking about it.  That is the power behind not only this trend but greater social technology as a whole. 

Do you think this matters for PR?  Can a company or brand use these tools to represent/humanize themselves online?

I’m sure everyone who has devised and executed a social media campaign, particularly one involving outreach to writers of blogs and other sites, has been asked to provide some sort of metric to justify such efforts. Often what’s asked for are pageviews or visitors or (gulp) impressions.

But here’s the story I tell all the time when people ask about my personal site’s reach: I get, on MMM, about 800 hits to the site a day. But a good amount of those come in, via searches, to posts I wrote months, if not years ago. So if you’re including MMM in your blog outreach plans and you’re basing its inclusion on that 800 +/- daily visits, you need to know that not all those 800 people are coming in through the front door.

That means some portion of that overall number of people are not seeing whatever you’ve just pitched me – yet – though some of them are. Unlike overall visitor numbers we can tell who’s hitting the front page. That is one advantage of the web versus traditional metrics like overall circulation – we can see how people move around on a site.

The 1,000+ people who subscribe to my RSS feed, though, definitely are. That’s because via the feed they’re always seeing the most recent content and updates, and they’re seeing them at a time of their choosing, whatever time they’ve blocked off to catch up on their reading. But I don’t think RSS subscriber numbers is something that’s often asked for or included when measuring success. This despite the fact that, based on my experience, far more publishers make their RSS subscriber numbers visible on their sites – largely through a FeedBurner chicklet – than make their site visit stats publicly viewable.

The same rings true here on OTD, where the number of people snagging the RSS feed vastly outstrip the number of hits to the site.

Considering there’s such a demand for numbers as a means to justify online public relations efforts; and considering there seem to be more publishers who use that FeedBurner number on their sites; and considering that number translates into a higher percentage of the audience that’s going to see the successful results of your outreach, I think it’s past time to start factoring RSS numbers into the numbers agencies provide to clients.

Now I’ll be the first to state that swapping one number for another does little or nothing to address the fact that influence in a particular vertical niche or community held by one person does not always correlate to certain numbers. But aside from anecdotal impressions given by those familiar with the online space there isn’t much we can do to back that up. Numbers are always more reassuring since that’s how traditional media has always been measured and that’s what people are looking for.

So as long as it’s numbers being asked for it’s incumbent on those of us navigating the online space on behalf of our clients to provide the best ones available. Considering all the factors above it seems to me RSS subscribers is probably one of the better numbers we can provide.